The Wrathful Planet: Fracking the Future

The Wrathful Planet – In recent decades, a technique for natural gas exploration and extraction known as ‘fracking’ has emerged which has had a ‘game changing’ impact for energy producers worldwide. In existence since the 1940’s the current technique involves a modernized combination of several preexisting techniques: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in combination with novel application of chemical agents.

With natural gas prices at their lowest in a decade the industry has a continued cost-efficiency over oil even in the face of forecasts speculating the doubling of the prices seen today. Where the price of oil is determined in a global market with perturbations being felt across the globe the market price of natural gas is typically intra-national and often times, as is the case with the United States, a regional one. Where certain deposits of natural gas have previously been cost ineffective to extract, fracking has opened the way for exponential growth for the Energy Industry.

Despite the advantages, many questions remain such as the environmental impact of the chemical blends used to improve well performance and other risks associated with deep ground extraction. Drilling takes place, not only in remote areas but in many cases in proximity to population centers and precious deep ground aquifers.

With service companies typically refusing to show the chemical agents used in fracking and loose or often watered-down regulations and safeguards, the public’s clamoring for transparency is reaching new heights. Not just the usual NIMBY (not in my back yard) fight, fracking has energized activists and communities across the United States.

To understand the nature of the fracking fight, one must gain an understanding of the methodologies at play. Each fracking operation while unique, has some core components shared across all extraction operations.

Vertical Drilling – This is the most traditional aspect of fracking and is employed in almost all types of extraction scenarios.

Horizontal Drilling – Traditional vertical wells can cut through gas rich rock layers, but only tap the portion of rock that the bore pass through. Horizontal drilling allows a curvature to be implemented into the bore path making it possible to target the desirable layer more effectively.

Hydraulic Fracturing – Using high pressure water (~95-99%) is mixed with chemical agents and pumped into the well. Deep underground, the gas rich rock layer is cracked and the fissures in the rock are held apart with sand or various types of grit. With the fissures held open, the gas issues forth and the well becomes active, capable of extracting exponentially more hydrocarbons that ever considered possible before.

Chemical Agents & Additives – The aforementioned substances mixed to create the fracking fluid are variable and many with some being known or suspected carcinogens and air pollutants. A 2011 Congressional Report details a number of findings distilled from data provided by 14 leading oil and gas providers.

The committee found that methanol was the chemical that was by far the most commonly used between the years of 2005 – 2009. Methanol is considered a Hazardous Air Pollutant (HAP) and is being review by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).

The foaming surfactant agent, 2-butoxyethanol (2-BE) was also heavily employed, which can cause hemolysis in humans in addition to causing damage to organs such as the spleen, liver, and bone marrow. Toxicological studies on humans have shown that this class of chemical is even more readily taken into the body when suspended within an aqueous solution. With fracking operations happening within relatively close proximity to deep ground aquifers and vital water tables the possibility for serious consequences becomes clear.

Consequences that became a reality for one small town in Wyoming. After years of issuing complaints about local water quality Pavillion, Wy residents petitioned the EPA to test water wells used by the area’s residents. Situated in the Wind River Indian Reservation, the Tribes, the Northern Arapahoe and Eastern Shoshone Indians have petitioned to be recognized as a State under the Clean Air Act.

January 2010 sampling

Complaints that led to the EPA testing ranged included:

Water taking on a yellow tint

Oral Numbness

Appearance of gas bubbles

Oily character/sheen

Loss of taste sense

Increased turbidity (cloudy as if with sediment)

Chemical-like smell

EPA Expanded Site Investigation results are pending but residents have been advised to use alternate sources of water.

Should heavy industry be responsible for self-regulation? Are we asking the wolf to play shepherd? Is the information I present to you today simply another example of civilian hysteria that pro-business forces regularly decry? Is it true what industry spokespersons say when they insinuate that the reason for the public resistance to fracking is the complex nature of the chemical agents themselves?

Regardless of the ultimate answer what we do know is that this is fracking is happening now and if service companies are operating in a gray area of the law where environmental impact and necessary commonsense statutes that proper legislation provide, then perhaps fracking is something worthy of closer inspection.

While the benefits of fracturing techniques are significant and perhaps ultimately necessary for an increasingly energy hungry world, the risks and collateral damage to communities and individuals must not go unappreciated.

If Humanity has indeed disrupted the natural balance of planet Earth, future generations will undoubtedly seek to learn by what manner and for what reasons this reality came to pass.

Long before humans started injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal, the level of atmospheric CO2 rose significantly as the Earth came out of its last ice age. Many scientists have long suspected that the source of that carbon was from the deep sea. But researchers haven’t […]

Polyploidal cancer cells—cells that have more than two copies of each chromosome—are much larger than most other cancer cells, are resistant to chemotherapy and radiation treatments and are associated with disease relapse. A new study by Brown University researchers is the first to reveal key physical properties of these “giant” cancer cells. The research, published […]

A team of scientists has uncovered new molecular properties of water—a discovery of a phenomenon that had previously gone unnoticed. Liquid water is known to be an excellent transporter of its own autoionization products; that is, the charged species obtained when a water molecule (H2O) is split into protons (H+) and hydroxide ions (OH−). This […]

Neutron stars are the smallest, densest stars in the universe, born out of the gravitational collapse of extremely massive stars. True to their name, neutron stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons — neutral subatomic particles that have been compressed into a small, incredibly dense celestial package. A new study in Nature, co-led by MIT […]

MIT researchers have developed novel photography optics that capture images based on the timing of reflecting light inside the optics, instead of the traditional approach that relies on the arrangement of optical components. These new principles, the researchers say, open doors to new capabilities for time- or depth-sensitive cameras, which are not possible with conventional […]

It turns out, female cheetahs are quite picky about their mates. And when they’re allowed to choose them, the chances of healthy offspring improve. A former graduate student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale recently published a study that explains at least one factor female cheetahs use to make those choices. The findings may lead to […]

Baylor College of Medicine is collaborating with VistaGen Therapeutics, Inc. on a study of the anti-suicidal effects of a new VistaGen drug candidate in healthy veteran volunteers. “The suicide rate is two times higher in veterans than in age- and sex-matched civilians,” said Dr. Marijn Lijffijt, assistant professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and […]

ICHEP 2018 participants. (Image: ICHEP 2018) It’s that time of the year when physicists from around the world gather at the “biggie” of conferences in high-energy physics — the biennial International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). This year’s event, the 39th in the series, is taking place in Seoul, South Korea, on 4–11 July. Here’s a taste […]

The CERN Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR) is a user facility for accelerator R&D (Image: Julien Ordan/CERN) The summer issue of Accelerating News is now online. In this issue you can read about: recent milestones passed by the HL-LHC collaboration, namely the construction of the first 11T dipole model prototype and the world's first crabbing of a […]

Five days hands-on Geant4 course organised by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and the University of Trento will be held in Trento (Italy) from 26 to 30 November 2018. Geant4 is a software toolkit, written in C++, for simulating tracking of particles in the matter with the Monte Carlo approach. The software is developed and maintained by […]

Ana Lopes LHCP participants in the San Domenico's Centre. (Image: R Serra/FotoBouque) Some 450 researchers from around the world headed to historic Bologna, Italy, on 4–9 June to attend the sixth Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) conference. The many talks demonstrated the breadth of the LHC physics programme, as the collider’s experiments dig deep into the […]

Ana Lopes Samuel Ting presenting the latest results from AMS in CERN’s main auditorium. (Image: Julien Ordan/CERN) “None of the AMS results were predicted”, said Samuel Ting when he presented the latest results from the space-based magnetic spectrometer last week to a packed main auditorium. The results include flux measurements of secondary cosmic rays and […]

XENON1T is housed in the underground hall of LNGS in Italy. The cryostat is located inside the large water tank (left) next to a three-story building containing auxiliary systems. (Image credit: Roberto Corrieri and Patrick De Perio.) XENON1T is the world’s largest and most sensitive detector for direct searches of dark matter in the form […]

A xenon–xenon collision recorded by the CMS detector. (Image: CMS/CERN) Some 900 nuclear physicists from all over the world are meeting this week in Venice, Italy, for Quark Matter 2018, the 27th International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus–Nucleus Collisions. The focus of the conference is the hot quark–gluon plasma (QGP) that is thought to have prevailed […]

In this issue you can read a report from the "Accelerator - Industry Co-Innovation" workshop identifying opportunities and research challenges for next-generation accelerators, learn about the Tactile Collider, a novel educational tool making accelerator science accessible for visually impaired (VI) school children; and find out more about why training (anti)matters, from the young researchers who joined a two-day […]

Nick Ellis (On behalf of the International Organising Committee) The fourth Asia-Europe-Pacific School of High-Energy Physics, AEPSHEP2018 (2018.aepshep.org), to be held in Quy Nhon, Vietnam, 12-25 September 2018, is open for applications (deadline 1 April 2018). AEPSHEP is held every second year, hosted in countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The first three Schools in the […]

A week-long international School on Low Energy Antimatter Physics will be held at CERN between the 25th and the 29th of June 2018. It will cover the challenges in antimatter facility design and optimization, beyond state of the art beam diagnostics and advanced detectors, as well as novel antimatter experiments. In addition to lectures by research […]